Commissioned by the Swedish Film Institute, and created in collaboration with high school students, this 1994 film about August Strindberg was taken over by Peter Watkins when funding ran out. It's an interpretive biography that re-enacts scenes from the life and plays of this tempestuous playwright, novelist, essayist, and painter. In Swedish with English subtitles.

"Thanks should be given to New Yorker Video for helping to distribute his films, which exist as cultural agitators during a time of mass complacency.... Freethinker jumps around in time and format, ranging from diary entries from Strindberg, his wife, his father, and others in the form of video diaries in which they outline their thoughts and feelings directly into the camera, to specific scenes from his plays that range from attacks on societal ills to raging arguments among families and between relationship-challenged men and women.... It's the rare piece of cinema that actively tries to grapple with the complexity of modern times and espouse some healthy rage and rebellion against the media machine."—Slant

"His filmmaking bravely seeks an insistence on personal truth—his own and the viewer's."—Bright Lights